Basking Just Below Carte Blanche

“May I just have your room number?” the waiter at the Bellini Bar of the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc in Antibes asked when I walked in around 9 p.m. on Saturday night. He was very polite and wearing an off-white, double-breasted jacket. I smiled. The hotel, one of the toniest in the world, costs thousands of dollars a night. On a quiet promontory on the Riviera, it’s where Hollywood power players stay during the Cannes Film Festival to escape the crowds on the Croisette, Cannes’ beachfront promenade, some nine miles away.

I explained I wasn’t a guest but needed a place to wait for a while. For the first time, I’d be covering the most exclusive party of the festival, hosted each year by Vanity Fair at the hotel’s waterfront retreat down a wide, tree-lined path from the main hotel. The waiter said he could only serve drinks to hotel guests, but would gladly offer tap water. Deal. I sat on the veranda with Rebecca Marshall, who was photographing the party.

“I’m a vegan, but I still wear leather,” a woman at the next table said. “I just don’t want an animal inside me.”

The sun began to set, and we looked out at the lush grounds — the Mediterranean pines, the soft light, the sea in the distance — sipped our water and had a good laugh at our circumstances.

This was just another day covering the Cannes Film Festival, where I am one of thousands of journalists who descend on the Riviera every year. This is my fourth time at Cannes, which ends May 28; Manohla Dargis, co-chief film critic for The Times, is also here, to review the films. I see as many as I can, but as The Times’s European culture correspondent, I mostly handle the “mondanités” — the parties, the news stories, the dressing up, the sourcing up. For anyone covering film, Cannes is like the Olympics meets the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland — a place where you can see amazing performances and chat with people you’d never be able to buttonhole back home. For me, home is Paris, so that means talking to film world people from New York and Los Angeles.

Covering the festival can be an exercise in sleep deprivation, of racing around in a daze between screenings, interviews and deadlines. Over the years, I’ve gotten more skilled at navigating Cannes’s vastness — where the theaters are, how long it’ll take to run to the different beach clubs and hotel rooftops where studios hold press events. A hierarchy of press badges grant varying levels of access: I’m lucky to have a pink one with a yellow dot, which is the second-highest ranking after the famous “carte blanche.” Lower-ranking badge holders spend as much time waiting in line as they do seeing movies.

Every year there are images from around the festival that linger in my memory, like so many unsnapped Instagrams. As I ate a solitary salade niçoise last week, the people at the next table were talking about how to modify a film to get it past Turkish censors. At a party for the Todd Haynes film “Wonderstruck,” I had a real conversation with Michelle Williams, who is a co-star in the film and has never given a bad performance, and with Sandy Powell, one of the best costume designers in the world. As Ms. Powell talked, my platform heels sank several inches into the sand. At a party hosted by Netflix in a rosé-colored villa high in the hills above Cannes, Ben Stiller made me laugh.

It can sometimes feel like living inside a surreal and even absurd bubble, especially when the festival coincides with horrible events elsewhere, like the deadly terrorist attack at a concert in Manchester, England, on Monday. This year’s security has been intense, and you have to get to screenings at least 30 minutes in advance to clear the metal detectors.

A few days after the Vanity Fair party, I went to Monoprix, France’s answer to Target, to buy supplies to clean the floor of my tiny rented apartment in Cannes. It overlooks a highway and collects exhaust dust, but has everything I need for a coveted assignment that remains a highlight of my year. I swept under the sneakers I wore to run to screenings and under my new red suede heels, the ones I wore to the Vanity Fair party at the Hôtel du Cap-Eden-Roc, just nine miles and several lifetimes away.